isits to the Gowdy ranch which Buck's talk seemed to show
had taken place. What had he been coming over for? I wondered, as I
heard Gowdy greeting me.

"Glad to see you, Mr. Vandemark," said he. "What can I do for you-all?"

"We heard you wanted a couple of hands," said I, "and we thought--"

"I need a couple of hundred," said he. "Put 'em to work, Mobley,"
turning to the overseer; and then he went off into a lot of questions
and orders about the work, after which he jumped into the buckboard
buggy, in which Pinck Johnson sat with the whip in his hands, and they
went off at a keen run, with Pinck urging the team to a faster pace, and
Gowdy holding to the seat as they went careering along like the wind.

We lived in a great barracks with his other men, and ate our meals in a
long room like a company of soldiers. It was a most interesting business
experiment which he was trying; and he was going behind every day. Where
land is free nobody will work for any one else for less than he can make
working for himself; and land was pretty nearly free in Monterey County
then. All a man needed was a team, and he could get tools on credit; and
I know plenty of cases of people breaking speculator's land and working
it for years without paying rent or being molested. The rent wasn't
worth quarreling about. But Gowdy couldn't get, on the average, as much
out of his hired men in the way of work as they would do for themselves.

Most of the aristocrats who came early to Iowa to build up estates, lost
everything they had, and became poor; for they did not work with their
own hands, and the work of others' hands was inefficient and cost,
anyhow, as much as it produced or more. Gowdy would have gone broke long
before the cheap land was gone, if it had not been for the money he got
from Kentucky. The poor men like me, the peasants from Europe like
Magnus--we were the ones who made good, while the gentility
went bankrupt.

After a few years the land began to take on what the economists call
"unearned increment," or community value, and the Gowdy lands began the
work which finally made him a millionaire; but it was not his work. It
was mine, and Magnus Thorkelson's, and the work of the neighbors
generally, on the farms and in the towns. It was the railroads and
school and churches. He would have made property faster to let his land
lie bare until in the 'seventies. I could see that his labor was
bringing him a loss, every day's work of it